At the house, we’ve been subscribed to satellite television, specifically Dish Network, for a couple of years now. We switched from Comcast cable due to their ever-rising costs. Now, for television, we pay half of what we were with Comcast. Recently, I’d been looking at upgrading the experience even more, through the power of DVR. Two weeks ago, we took the plunge and got it.
A Digital Video Recorder (DVR) is kind of like a VCR. You set up stuff you want to record, it records it, you play it back later. In summary, the differences are:
- It uses a computer hard drive, not a cassette tape.
- It has a LOT more capacity; ours on average can record 100 hours of programming, unlike a standard VCR tape of 6 hours.
- You can set it up to hunt down what you want to watch, any time it’s on, and it’ll record it for you
Those features alone almost made it worthwhile. But, it also automatically records live television for you. Say for example, I flip around the dial and stop to watch something on Food Network. The DVR automatically starts recording this for me, without my having to tell it to. This opens up all sorts of new options. Because it’s being treated as a playback, I can, for example, pause live television. I get hungry, I get distracted, whatever. I can pause live TV, and come back a little while later and start playing it again like nothing happened. Live TV can also be rewound (like if I missed what someone was saying) and fast forwarded (presuming it’s already aired and has been recorded; it’s not a fortune teller).
This little box has already revolutionized how we watch television. We rarely watch live TV anymore. We both set up a bunch of television shows we like to watch (sometimes our tastes overlap, but not often). The DVR runs off and automatically records them whenever they’re on; we don’t even have to know when they air. When we sit down to watch TV, we pick a show off a menu. We can fast forward through all commercials; our remote has a button for jumping forward 30 seconds at a time. Commercials are over for us in about 5 seconds. It doesn’t automatically advance through commercials, but we can handle hitting a button a few times, and there’s no lag time like with a VCR fast forwarding. If we decide to do something else for a bit, we pause the playback and come back whenever, or stop it and come back later; the playback picks right back up from where we stopped it. The only things we watch are the things we WANT to watch; no more (well, very little) channel surfing anymore followed by cries of “there’s nothing on!”; no more sitting down 5 minutes into a program and missing the first 5 minutes; no more missing the most exciting parts of a program because a telemarketer called.
Sure, it costs us. Dish Network wanted $70 to upgrade our receiver (normally a $300 value or so), and an extra $6 per month for the privilege of using the DVR. But that’s a $6 a month we’re gladly paying for all of the advantages it gives us.
Everyone I know keeps telling me to get a DVR, but I’m just so afraid that I’ll never talk to them again once I get it. I can easily see how you can end up spending a lot of time in front of the television watching shows that you weren’t previously spending time watching (because you were busy elsewhere.)
Oddly, we haven’t started spending that much more time in front of the TV. It’s more a case of, when we do sit down, there’s guaranteed to be something on we can watch right away. We can even choose what to watch based on how much time we have; for example, if I want to go to bed in half an hour, I don’t have to watch an hour long program (or, if I want to anyway, I can watch it in about 45 minutes after skipping past the commercials).
Although, we may have to change that and start watching more; I think we’re up to 50 hours or so taken up with programming to watch…. <gulp>